Water: one of the most multifaceted and precious elements on Earth

I’m thrilled to be starting in January as a Visiting Professor with the School and at Royal Roads University[1].  By way of introduction, I’m a ‘water person’ to the core. I’ve been fascinated/obsessed with water issues since childhood. My grandfather built wooden sailboats for fun and some of my earliest memories are sailing with him. Even today, if I’m not researching water, I want to be on, in or near water.

I’m also constitutionally incapable of working within disciplinary boundaries. This commitment to transdisciplinary research has been both a strength and challenge but I’m a problem-focused pragmatist. In other words: I’ll use ideas from any discipline that offers useful insights or methods.  In my research, I view the water-and-society relationship as a complex interaction over time, space and culture.

Water decisions represent how societies and individuals understand these relationships and are clues to what societies prioritize and value.  For example, individual and policy decisions around water efficiency reflect economic, ethical and social values as well as engineering history and an anthropogenic perspective on the environment.  Similarly, the inclusion or exclusion of some types of knowledge, groups or perspectives often reflect power structures, gender and cultural norms, and dominant or diverging worldviews about the nature of science.

Within my research team, we talk about ‘hero projects’: figuring out why individuals and societies make the decisions they do about water is one of my hero projects. If we can figure out water, something so fundamental to our very existence, then maybe, just maybe we’ll make some progress on the other urgent and interrelated socio-ecological issues.

Sarah Wolfe, Associate Professor, SERS

 [1] I’ve been a post-doc through to tenured Associate Professor in the School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability (SERS, formerly ERS) at the University of Waterloo. My Ph.D. (2007) is from the University of Guelph’s Department of Geography, MA from the University of Toronto’s collaborative program in Political Science and Environmental Studies, and a BA from the University of Guelph’s International Development program (Biophysical Environment).